It’s a rare example of English being simpler than other languages, so I’m curious if it’s hard for a new speaker to keep the nouns straight without the extra clues.

  • @[email protected]
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    12 hours ago

    It’s not, why would that even be a good thing? Get rid of adding identifies to objects like a 6yo.

  • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed
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    12 hours ago

    Technically English is my third languge, but also simultaneously my most fluent.

    In short, not confusing at all. Because in Chinese (any variation of Chinese) nouns are also not gendered.

    Pronouns in Chinese are also not gendered

    He = 他 (tā)

    She = 他 (tā)

    No confusion with pronouns either. My parents constantly say he when refering to a woman, or she when refering to a man, or mix them up while talking about the same person in the same conversation. No me tho, I never get confused. I learned English at like grade 2-3.

    • @Tkpro
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      11 hour ago

      What? She in Chinese is 她. It might not be used often but it definitely is gendered…

      • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed
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        1 hour ago

        Nope. 她 isn’t really used. 他 is the pronoun, even if its refering to women.

        Like if you wrote 他 to refer to a woman in an essay on a test, it’d get marked as correct.

        Edit: Although, on the internet, people commonly type “TA” instead of “他”.

        Edit 2: So clarification

        他 refers to both men and women

        她 can only be used to refer to women, and this is rarely used, except maybe in english class to teach about the english pronouns

        它 refers to non humans, like animals or objects

        all 3 are pronounce the same exact way (tā)

      • @JeremyHuntQW12
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        13 hours ago

        …because its the articles which are not gendered, not the nouns.

      • @BrianTheeBiscuiteer
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        55 hours ago

        As the speaker of an English language me can tell you is not a difficult.

  • @astanix
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    58 hours ago

    As someone trying to learn Spanish I wish there was no gendering in Spanish. It makes the language significantly harder to learn.

  • YTG123
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    1111 hours ago

    It’s not confusing at all, except in the very specific case of nouns referring to people or animals that don’t have gendered variants.

    For example, in my language, the word corresponding to “(a) sheep” has a masculine and feminine form, with the feminine used neutrally. Consequently, when seeing “sheep” in English, I assume the feminine and seeing it used with “he” is a bit of cognitive dissonance.

    Similarly, most words for human professions are by default masculine.

    • Mad_Punda
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      48 hours ago

      I remember reading a story written in English, and it kept mentioning „the cook“ (no pronoun, no name). My gender biased brain assumed the cook must be male. So I got confused when the pronoun „she“ finally appeared. I had to reread the paragraph to understand what was going on.
      Embarrassing and eye opening.

    • @[email protected]
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      39 hours ago

      Ive spent some times on farms and haven’t ever herd/used he for a singular male sheep before.

      If its a singular male I would say the ram.

      But its just normally sheep, generally female. If you want to be specific its weathers, ewes, lambs or rams.

  • @frankenswine
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    11418 hours ago

    not at all. it simplifies the learning experience by quite a bunch.

    one of the more confusing is learning other gendered languages where the gender of some object is different to the one in your mother tongue

    • Canadian_Cabinet
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      3217 hours ago

      To make matters worse, some languages have the exact same word but with a different gender. Heat in Spanish is el calor but in Catalán is la calor

      • @[email protected]
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        4016 hours ago

        To make matters even worse, in some languages the exact same word with different gender has different meaning.

        In German:
        “der Band”, male, = a (book) volume
        “das Band”, neutral, = ribbon
        “die Band”, female = (music) band

        Bonus: “die Bande” can be a gang, a sports barrier, and (relationship) ties.

    • thisisbutaname
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      1218 hours ago

      Yeah I basically never thought about the gender of English nouns because there’s very few reasons to

    • @ZombiepirateOP
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      1218 hours ago

      one of the more confusing is learning other gendered languages where the gender of some object is different to the one in your mother tongue

      That’s something I hadn’t really considered. Interesting!

  • qyron
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    912 hours ago

    Not.

    English is a very straigh forward to learn language.

    Now, an English native speaker learning a gender declining language… oh, how fun to watch.

      • qyron
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        410 hours ago

        I speak my native language for a couple of decades now and the more I speak it, the more I realize I don’t master it.

        I can read, write and hold a conversation in English. But if asked, I will say I can get by but very far from even the lowest level of mastery.

  • Caveman
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    1114 hours ago

    Not at all, it’s easier that other gendered languages since object genders get shuffled up.

  • @TankovayaDiviziya
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    1816 hours ago

    If you want to be more confused, you should know that some languages have gendered verbs.

  • @[email protected]
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    2717 hours ago

    no, we just learn that “der”, “die”, “das”, “den”, “dem” all translate to “the”

  • 𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒆𝒍
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    12 hours ago

    Not at all, it makes it simpler, in many cases you don’t even need it or is even simpler to convey the gender in other ways

  • @Treczoks
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    16 hours ago

    The nouns still are gendered. Only the article is gender-neutral.

    Tarzan is a man. He lives in the jungle.

    Jane is a woman. She is visiting Africa.

    The elephant is a non-named animal. It eats fruits and leaves.

    If you really want to know a confusing issue about the English language, just look at the pronunciation of words. It is more or less rule-free, and all over the place. Don’t believe me? Try to read the poem “The Chaos” aloud. Even most native speakers need several attempts.

  • @[email protected]
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    13 hours ago

    Non-gendered wording isn’t exclusive to English, it’s mostly other European languages that stick to doing that.

    There are some languages that don’t even have different words for “he” and “she”.

    Edit: made the wording less asshole-y

    • @ZombiepirateOP
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      2118 hours ago

      Non-gendered wording isn’t exclusive to English. Asia exists.

      I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise.

      Thanks for the insight!

      • @[email protected]
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        317 hours ago

        Chinese is even cooler in that they don’t need different, often irregular versions of the same word for tense and plural either.

          • @[email protected]
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            16 hours ago

            They lose out in that any time you refer to something that can be counted, you have an irregular counting word before it. Each word doesn’t get its own counting word though, and there’s a generic, ge you can always use if you have the vocabulary of a 3 year old, so it’s not that bad, but it’s still completely unnecessary memorization.

    • NoneOfUrBusiness
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      517 hours ago

      Non-gendered wording isn’t exclusive to English. Asia exists.

      I mean to be fair those languages have other ways of determining which word does what other than sentence order and vibes if my knowledge of basic Chinese is correct.

  • Nicht BurningTurtle
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    714 hours ago

    You get used to it. The other way around is likely a lot harder, considering that a new concept is being introduced.

    • @[email protected]
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      413 hours ago

      Can confirm. English is my first language and I took German in high school; it was basically just memorization for which words get which.